Among the many great things on display at the Alt Weekly Comics show at the Society Of Illustrators in New York City are a number of pieces from Mark Newgarden‘s New York Press strip, including this Little Nun (copied from his book We All Die Alone, Fantagraphics, 2006).
This reminded me to dig back to an interview I conducted back in August 1993 with Newgarden for issue number 161 of The Comics Journal which gives some more details on the making of the great Little Nun strip. The complete text of this interview will appear on this site shortly.
Newgarden on The Little Nun
I was really trying to work with a lot of self-imposed limitations: No dialogue, pantomime strips with no close-ups, or very few close-ups. No “camera” moves. They were influenced a lot by [Ernie] Bushmiller, [Otto] Soglow too, who did The little King. It was always pantomime, the Little King character, anyway. He would only have the other characters talk. But in The Little Nun, no one’s allowed to talk. It’s all pantomime. You rarely see that stuff anymore. It’s a relatively hard thing to do. It’s not an easy thing at all. You almost have to draw like Bushmiller or Soglow, you have to be crystal clear and ultra simple in your drawings to make them read. A lot of people still have trouble reading pantomime strips. They are not used to looking at the pictures that closely. They’re used to reading it from balloon to balloon and then going on to the next thing.
Show below are photos of the original art, showing how The Little Nun was created on graph paper.
Newgarden: They were hard. They took a long time. I did all The Little Nuns on gridded graph paper and it was like a lot of math. Slavishly making minute changes—the kind of stuff Bushmiller did as second nature. But it was a lot of slow work with rulers and Rapidographs and drafting stuff. It much more fun and easier and satisfying to do stuff like Meet the Cast.
Newgarden: But she’s a character I really like a lot. There used to be this strip called The Strange World of Mr. Mum (above, by Irving Phillips). It was a gag panel where there was no dialogue and this guy would observe weird gag cartoon situations. The little Nun has got a lot to do with that. She’s just there and her only reaction, ever, to anything, is praying. My grandmother’s reaction to anything disastrous would just be silently praying.
Kelly: Like the one where she shoots herself in the head so a flower could grow.
Newgarden: Yeah. That sums up Catholicism for me in a nutshell!
Spooky Comics 